kill your heroes
by exploding-empires
Summary: "I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars." -— T. E. Lawrence / the next generation in 33 ways.


**a/n**: this is the first chapter of my collection for the nextgen armada competition on the nextgen fanatics forum, which i will undoubtedly abandon, but it's such a lovely idea. this particular one is non-linear.

this is for roma (justalittleloony) who told me a long time ago that she liked the way teddy's name looked with rose's and i've always associated this pairing with her ever since. i love you, darling, and i hope you enjoy this!

**warning**: this story contains a student/teacher relationship, so don't read if that offends you. more importantly, this contains references to fires and a major character death from the start. if either of these could upset/trigger you, please _do not_ read this.

* * *

**kill your heroes  
**_teddy_ + _rose  
_1,250 words

/

well i have brittle bones it seems  
i bite my tongue and i torch my dreams  
- **candles**,** daughter**

* * *

The fire engine arrived too late.

Teddy would never forgive them for that.

/

He thinks that if he'd ever been inclined to paint it would've been those evenings, when Rose would smoke cigarettes in his room in just his work shirt buttoned up very haphazardly, with this sort of _glow_ about her and the passion in her eyes as she talked loudly about Raphael in between the kisses she would press to him, like she needed him, and he felt the most important he'd ever felt when Rose Weasley confessed her opinions on post-Impressionist art and Achilles and Patroclus to him in the crisp autumn of her seventh year at Hogwarts.

/

Until she was sixteen, Teddy never really looked twice at Rose. She was just another Weasley cousin - they were friends, sure, and he was very affectionate of her, the way he was with all of them. But there was an undisputable age gap, and he'd never even considered their relationship moving into romance.

And then there she was, suddenly, and she was - Merlin, she was _stunning_. Somehow, when he wasn't looking, Rose has grown into the lanky frame she got from her father, and her mother's beauty is hard to ignore, especially when combined with the almost unbeatable Weasley genes.

Victoire is very beautiful, of course; how could she not be, with the gene pool that girl had lucked out on? The same goes for Dominique, but if anything, Teddy thinks that out of these three cousins, Victoire is the least attractive to him. She is a conventional beauty, the kind that you can admire but never touch, and although she's a lovely girl, she holds herself with the kind of confidence that must only come with Veela heritage.

Whereas Rose, with a different poem inking her skin every day and the noticeable habit of forgetting to brush her hair for days on end: she is not the girl he should notice in a crowded room, but she is and there doesn't seem to be much he can do about that.

/

In her last year, he got a job as Professor of Defence Against The Dark Arts at Hogwarts. It was his dream post, everything he'd worked for since he was fifteen years old - and now he was twenty-five and when he looked out at his first lesson with the seventh years, the only face he saw was Rose Weasley's.

After the lesson, she hung behind and he hoped pointlessly that she wouldn't say anything, she was just dawdling and she'd leave with the rest of them. It was a ridiculous idea. Rose Weasley wouldn't dream of doing anything you wanted her to.

"Teddy," she said, with a beam.

"You're really supposed to call me Professor Lupin here," he said, cautiously, knowing that Rose wouldn't care.

She ignored him and wrapped him in a hug. "I just _knew_ you'd be great. God, Teddy, it was so, so good! Much better than old Professor Dickens, although he was a darling."

"Thanks, Rose," he said. There was no point informing Rose of the boundaries between students and teachers, because she wouldn't listen and anyway, he knew that Professor McGonagall was perfectly aware that the Weasley-Potter children were going to disregard the rules when it came to Teddy, because he was practically their brother. "Was it alright? Really, truly?"

"Yes, Teddy, it was fabulous!" Rose said, and the way her eyes lit up made him feel all wrong again. "One of the best lessons I can remember for a long time. I really liked the stuff you said about Boggarts; of course, we do them in third year, but we didn't go into that level of detail at all."

Teddy smiled vaguely, because he couldn't keep his mind from wandering to the fact that Victoire kept making passes at him, and he said he'd meet Imogen Bones for a drink, and he hadn't considered the implications behind it until just that moment.

Rose sat on his desk for a while and they talked. The lesson had been last period and the Scottish September sky had begun to darken outside the window. Teddy couldn't remember for the life of him, later, what they had talked about. He only knew that Rose's skirt rode up and she quoted Homer and a book with Van Eyck's Ghent alterpiece on the front was poking out of her bag.

"I think you want to kiss me," Rose said, nonchalantly.

"Sorry, what?"

"Oh, for Merlin's sake, Teddy, you never were very proactive, were you?" she said with a roll of her eyes, and she kissed him.

/

It was such a stupid way for a genius to die. She laid a cigarette down on her essay for a second, to close the window, and then it had caught fire and she was slightly drunk and panicked and Teddy was out and she didn't manage to put it out in time.

Teddy doesn't think about it too much. Not just because of what had happened to Rose, but because of how it had happened. She could set fire to herself without a second thought - her smoking addiction was one of the worst he'd known - but he knew that she'd hate to be suffocated, hate to choke on the poisonous air she'd created for herself. It was ridiculous, in all honesty. She would've been disappointed. She wouldn't have minded being poisoned at dinner - that would've been exciting and fairytale and glamorous. But being poisoned unintentionally; by _herself_. That was just embarrassing.

/

Miraculously, nobody found out (partly due to Teddy's unfailing knack of keeping his mouth shut, and partly due to the genius of Rose Weasley), not even Albus Potter, who counted both parties among his best friends.

Afterwards, they waited six months before they told the family about their relationship. The response was generally favourable - better than it could have been, at any rate - only tinged with a slight note of _you're eight years older, Teddy, you were her _teacher_ last year_. But nobody could come up with a really good argument against the relationship, and nobody could deny that when they came together, it was as though something divinely important had happened; the universe's two brightest stars had aligned.

/

When they moved in together, nobody was really surprised.

Teddy was still working at Hogwarts, and Rose was doing a combined degree in art history and ancient Greek literature at a Muggle university. In a way, he thought, they were living up to exactly who they should've been. In a way, that disappointed him.

/

Rose never kicked the cigarette habit, Teddy remembered posthumously. It had become inextricably linked with her; to the point that if someone asked for a lighter, he frequently looked around for her presence. Those were the moments that hurt the most, when he forgot for a blissful millisecond over something truly mundane that reminded him of another everyday element of Rose he'd never properly celebrated.

When Teddy thinks about Rose, he wants to write a thousand sonnets for her, but he knows that that is the last thing she'd want, because he can't write for toffee and Rose likes classical poetry and romanticism. He thinks it's a shame he never had the desire to paint, because the moments in his bedroom at Hogwarts were among the most beautiful of his life, even if she was only in her underwear, smoking a cigarette.

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**a/n**: thank you for reading! i'd really appreciate a review, especially if you're going to be kind enough to favourite. :)


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